Nuclear Engineering and Technology

Korean Nuclear Society (한국원자력학회)
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Radiation-induced thermal conductivity degradation modeling of zirconium

  • Received : 2022.08.11
  • Accepted : 2023.11.15
  • Published : 2024.04.25
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Abstract

This study presents a radiation-induced thermal conductivity degradation (TCD) model of zirconium as compared to the conventional UO2 TCD model. We derived the governing factors of the radiation-induced TCD model, such as maximum TCD value and temperature range of TCD. The maximum TCD value was derived by two methods, in which 1) experimental result of 32 % TCD was directly utilized as the maximum TCD value and 2) a theoretical approach based on dislocation was applied to derive the maximum TCD value. Further, the temperature range of TCD was determined to be 437-837 K by 1) experimental results of post-annealing of irradiation hardening as compared to 2) the rate theory and thermal equilibrium. Consequently, the radiation-induced TCD model of zirconium was derived to be $f_r=1-{\frac{0.32}{1+{\exp}\,\{(T-637)/45\}}}$. Because the thermal conductivity of zirconium is one of the factors determining the storage and transport system, this newly proposed model could improve the safety analysis of spent fuel storage systems.

Keywords

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by the Institute for Korea Spent Nuclear Fuel (iKSNF) and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korean government (Ministry of Science and ICT, MSIT) (No. 2021M2E1A1085226).

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